NEW RESOURCES

New to me, thanks to a tipoff from Reddit: a digital archive dedicated to early 1990s raves in Sydney, Australia. I can’t decide what I like better: the gallery of rave flyers from 1989-1998, the huge collection of rave “mixtapes,” or the surprisingly solid video section (surprising amount of video here, considering that this was pre-ubiquitous-phone-camera.)

“The Dark Side,” a Backstreet Boys fan forum, has gotten a huge amount of digital media and is developing an online archive. “So thanks to a member of our forum, Hayley…, I (Rose) have come into possession of the treasure trove of media. Over a decade of appearances, concerts, you name it, from all over the world!”

TWEAKS & UPDATES

Kind of surprised you couldn’t do this before, but now if you want to report harassment on Twitter, you can report multiple tweets at a time. “Previously, anytime you felt someone was harassing you on Twitter, you would have to file a separate report per tweet, which could be particularly problematic for users with many followers or who have taken a lot of heat for a singular comment.”

Your Tuesday silly: the Olympic Torch now has a Twitter account. “The verified account, which is going with the sensible username @OlympicFlame, is sending out messages from the traditional relay run, which is set to finish at the Olympic stadium in Rio, Brazil when the sporting extravaganza begins on August 5.”

Chatter is going around that Facebook is developing its own standalone camera app. Why?

USEFUL STUFF

The title of the article is How to identify any language at a glance, and I think that’s reaching a bit. But this article on how to tell various languages apart has a lot of tricks I’d never seen. The one about how to tell written Chinese and Japanese apart is one I’ve got to remember…

Family History Daily looks at using Google Keep as a genealogy research assistant. Thanks to Robert G for the heads-up!

AROUND THE SEARCH AND SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD

This is about the government of Canada, but any citizen anywhere ought to be concerned: The vanishing act of government documents – and what to do about it “I would like to share my story of how lost government information has impacted my ability to carry out my job as a government information librarian. I have been digitizing Canadian government publications[iii] without applying for copyright permission based on the 2010 copyright statement from a news release of Crown Copyright and Licensing (CCL). The news release states, that for non-commercial purposes, ‘permission to reproduce Government of Canada works is no longer required.’ However, in 2011, the link to this news release was broken. Instead, we found this information on the CCL site: ‘A permission/license is needed when a Government of Canada work is being reproduced.’ After searching frantically everywhere for a print copy of the 2010 news release with no success, we were worried that if the University was sued for infringement of the crown copyright law, we would have no evidence to back us up.”

Google is apparently launching its own startup incubator. “Here’s how Area 120 will work: First, teams within Google will submit a business plan and apply to join Area 120. If successful, the teams will get to work full-time on their idea for a few months.” Considering how some of the external acquisitions are going, this is not a bad idea, especially if Google is worried about culture clash.

What happened when a guy pretended to be a chatbot for two months. Interesting takeaways. Searchers will appreciate the revelation the nobody asks the same question the same way, using the same words. “The bots we have today, would maybe function OK in a limited environment, and with super-patient users. But unleash such an app on the open market — and normal users will just find it frustrating and complicated.”

The DC Police Department is getting a lot more attention on social media — via a strategy that uses emoji and animated GIFs. “Between March and April 2015, the police department saw on average 121 link clicks, 112 retweets and 26 likes per day generated by both their Facebook and Twitter properties. In 2016, during the same timeframe, those numbers look drastically different: averaging 213 link clicks, 106 retweets and 90 likes per day resulting in roughly 5.6 million impressions over a 56-day period. An impression, in this context, refers to an individual view.”

SECURITY/LEGAL ISSUES

Uh-oh: it looks like Spotify might have been hacked. “A list containing hundreds of Spotify account credentials – including emails, usernames, passwords, account type and other details – has popped up on the website Pastebin, in what appears to be a possible security breach. After reaching out to a random sampling of the victims via email, we’ve confirmed that these users’ Spotify accounts were compromised only days ago.” Spotify is denying any hack incident. Good morning, Internet…

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